How Netroots Killed The Fox Debate

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had been under weeks of pressure from liberal bloggers and MoveOn.org members angry about a scheduled Democratic debate co-sponsored by Fox News.

By last Thursday, Reid was ready to hear the rabble-rousers out.

Story Continued Below

In a 20-minute conference call, a group of bloggers told Reid an uprising was brewing over the decision by the Nevada State Democratic Party to partner with Fox for the August debate in Reno. Among the bloggers, some were national -- Matt Stoller of MyDD, Markos Moulitsas Zúniga of DailyKos -- and some were local -- Hugh Jackson of the Las Vegas Gleaner.

In the call, Reid explained that he had been focused on the Iraq war debate the past few weeks and didn’t seem to have closely followed the controversy over the Fox sponsorship. (When the debate was announced last month, Reid called it “great news for Nevada” and declared himself “happy.”)

Stoller said the bloggers told Reid that the issue was spoiling his popularity with the party’s Netroots: his DailyKos straw poll approval rating, they told him, had gone from the mid-80s to around 40 percent recently.

Reid backed off of his support of the debate, contending that he had had nothing to do with the decision, adding, “I don’t like Fox News.”

About 1:30 p.m. on Friday, Fox got a call from Bill Buck, a liaison working as a media consultant for the Nevada State Democratic Party. He said the debate “was in trouble,” said sources knowledgeable about the day’s events. Buck and Jamal Simmons, both national political veterans, are media consultants with the Washington, D.C.-based firm New Future Communications.

Fox Vice President David Rhodes then called Reid spokesman Jim Manley for an explanation. Manley told Rhodes he would get back to him shortly. The next time Rhodes heard from him was after 9 p.m. Friday, when Manley called to make sure the network had received an e-mail and fax informing Fox that Democrats were dropping the debate.

Reid’s office confirmed the exchange over the weekend but would not comment on the decision-making process.

About 3 p.m., Rhodes called a top representative of the Nevada state party who was hearing the news for the first time, two sources said. (News outlets began learning about the cancellation about the same time.)

The state party official whom Fox called was spokeswoman Kirsten Searer, said several sources familiar with the call. She was on vacation in Los Angeles and directed Fox to the party’s media consultants.

At around the same time that Buck was calling Fox, Simmons was on the phone with MoveOn officials. He was telling them to call off the troops because the decision had been made to dump Fox, said two sources.

MoveOn then spiked an e-mail – not yet sent but which had begun to trickle out – that asked its supporters to continue to call state party officials and urge them to boycott the debate. (Over previous weeks, Reid, and state and county Democratic officials in Nevada, had already received many of these calls.)

Several senior-level Democrats familiar with the situation insist that Reid’s office was in agreement with the decision but did not force the state party to act. The consensus, they say, was reached during a mid-morning conference call between Reid staffers and Nevada state party officials, including Rebecca Lambe, a senior adviser to the party.

A Nevada official confirmed to The Politico that Lambe was on the call and supported canceling the debate.

State party Chairman Tom Collins wasn’t in the meeting because he was not in the office that day, said a source with knowledge of the call, but he later approved the recommendation. That approval came after news reports about the cancellation.

Fox officials now say they doubt that the decision was organically local. “Reid’s in the news release announcing that we’re having the debate, and Reid signed the letter announcing that we’re not having the debate, so this idea that he had nothing to do with it—does that make any sense?” a Fox executive said Monday.

“I think he wants it both ways. I think he wants to have done for the blogs and yet he can’t be seen as doing for the blogs because he’s supposed to be the Senate majority leader and the leader of the Nevada Democratic Party.”

Publicly, the Democrats blamed the cancellation on a comment made Thursday evening by Fox President Roger Ailes, who jokingly confused Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) with Osama bin Laden. Obama has said he was not offended by the remark, and Fox has said the joke was meant to be on President Bush.

A top Democratic official said the remark did factor into the decision, but was only part of the reason. “Out of deference to Fox, we didn’t go through the whole litany of problems,” he said.

That litany included Ailes’ attack on presidential candidate John Edwards for skipping the debate and Fox’s consistently negative coverage of Democrats, including regular swipes at Obama’s middle name (Hussein), his father’s religion (Islam), and his secondary schooling (Fox cited an Insight magazine story that incorrectly claimed that Obama had attended a madrasah in Indonesia, but that report preceded the decision to partner with Fox. Fox later corrected the Insight story).

The official conceded, though, that pressure from MoveOn members and the bloggers played a significant role as well.

On March 8, the day before the party dropped out of sponsoring the debate, it released a letter supporting the debate. It was signed by 21 prominent state Democrats representing nine counties, including Washoe (Reno) and Clark (Las Vegas), the most important to Democrats. (The letter has since been removed from the state party's Web site.)

The battle began when state chairman Collins rejected a MoveOn proposal to have two moderators from Air America, the liberal radio network, to complement two moderators from Fox. Collins consented to three Fox moderators and one from Air America, and the negotiations fell apart, said a MoveOn source.

Collins didn’t respond over the weekend to requests for comment.

That’s when the barrage of political pressure from a coalition intent on booting Fox from the debate began. Robert Greenwald, the director of the anti-Fox News documentary “Outfoxed,” created a short video compiling Fox attacks on Obama.

“I started telling people I was doing [the video], and in the middle of it came this decision for Fox News to hold the debate and people suggested I use it to persuade them not to go forward with it,” said Greenwald. More than 300,000 people have viewed the clip; by signing a petition on the Web site, viewers became linked in with the MoveOn campaign, which gathered more than 265,000 signatures.

MoveOn is now doing victory laps. “We hope that this sends a clear message to states like Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina and presidential contenders that Fox is a right-wing mouthpiece. We hope the result is that Fox is permanently chilled within Democratic circles from being considered a neutral news source worth legitimizing,” said MoveOn organizer Adam Green.

Fox News was not quite as pleased. “News organizations will want to think twice before getting involved in the Nevada Democratic Caucus, which appears to be controlled by radical fringe out-of-state interest groups, not the Nevada Democratic Party. In the past, MoveOn.org has said they ‘own’ the Democratic Party. While most Democrats don’t agree with that, it’s clearly the case in Nevada,” Rhodes said in a statement.

Many state Democratic officials were caught off-guard by the announcement, leading to speculation that the decision was handed down from Washington. “I’m not dropping the debate,” Collins told a reporter from the Las Vegas Review-Journal after the debate had already been dropped. “I’m not dropping Fox. The majority of the elected state party supports keeping this debate.”

County chairmen learned of the cancellation via e-mail shortly after a letter had been sent to both Fox and the press announcing that the debate was off.

“I know this might be a surprise given conversations we have recently had on this issue,” state party spokeswoman Kirsten Searer wrote in an e-mail to 34 state officials.

The e-mail went out at 8:59 p.m. East Coast time, nearly three hours after The Politico reported that the debate was off.